At times the film's Buddhist lessons feel a bit forced, but the naturalistic performances Davaa has coaxed from a real-life Mongolian family, and her intimate understanding of their culture and values, give this sensitive portrayal its heft. - Village VoiceEDIT

Julia Jentsch gives a brilliantly nuanced performance as Sophie, a fun-loving girl who likes marmalade and Schubert but also happens to be a rare beacon of conscience in totalitarianism's dark night. - Village VoiceEDIT

Despite the choppy script and cartoonishly bad villains, what emerges is a compelling tale of the moral compromises a corrupt system demands of even its most unwilling participants. - Village VoiceEDIT

Amelio's camera captures with subtlety and without sentimentality the state of mind of a parent for whom every child running freely in the park is a painful reminder of another's limitations. - Village VoiceEDIT

Hardcore Kiarostami devotees may miss the master's harsher clarity, but Hatami, best known for her starring role in Dariush Mehrjui's Leila, makes her character's inner transformation both subtle and palpable. - Village VoiceEDIT

Deville has managed to preserve the work's great virtues -- the intimacy, discretion, grace, and humor with which it speaks of both irredeemable disaster and the taste for life that survives it. - Village VoiceEDIT

A family feeling pervades this intimate documentary, which follows three months of creation for a single season's collection (Winter 2001), from the first drawings to the last finished garment. - Village VoiceEDIT

The problems come in the shadow world, where everything's a jumble, where Dark's compositional strategy ('all clues and no solutions') eventually becomes wearing, and Gordon's direction can't hold it all together. - Village VoiceEDIT

Slesin's film is a profound meditation on the resilience of children -- their ability to take sustenance from whatever love is available -- and on the persistent presence of the child hidden within each grown-up. - Village VoiceEDIT

Offers an incisive glimpse into one woman's inner transformation -- her secret sense of loss in the midst of plenty and her sudden perception of a world of suffering lying just beyond her home. - Village VoiceEDIT

There's an admirable rigor to Jimmy's relentless anger, and to the script's refusal of a happy ending, but as those monologues stretch on and on, you realize there's no place for this story to go but down. - Village VoiceEDIT